Lifeboat Foundation

Andreessen argues that thanks to A.I., “productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet.”

This week, on the Lex Fridman Podcast, he offered advice to young people who want to stand out in what he describes in this “freeze-frame moment” with A.I.—where tools like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are suddenly available and “everybody is kind of staring at them wondering what to do.”

Continue reading “Marc Andreessen says we’re in a ‘freeze-frame moment’ with A.I.—and has advice for young people” »

ALBION, MI — Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan was the last person to step foot on the Moon more than five decades ago. In 2025, someone new will take his place.

The NASA Artemis mission aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, as well as explore more of the lunar surface.

A pair of Albion College professors are participating in the mission’s research into the origins and evolution of the Moon, college officials said.

A two-faced protein in a chain that regulates iron and other elements in cells could provide a new target to treat cancer, diabetes and other diseases.

A team of researchers at Rice University, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of North Texas detailed the structure of a protein called mitochondrial inner NEET (MiNT), part of a pathway that stabilizes mitochondria, the organelles that produce energy for cells.

Their report appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Huge libraries of drug compounds may hold potential treatments for a variety of diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally test each of these compounds against all possible targets, but doing that kind of screen is prohibitively time-consuming.

In recent years, researchers have begun using computational methods to screen those libraries in hopes of speeding up drug discovery. However, many of those methods also take a long time, as most of them calculate each target protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino-acid.

Researchers in Japan and Australia have developed a new multicore optic fiber able to transmit a record-breaking 1.7 petabits per second, while maintaining compatibility with existing fiber infrastructure. The team–from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia—achieved the feat using a fiber with 19 cores. That’s the largest number of cores packed into a cable with a standard cladding diameter of 0.125 micrometers.

“We believe 19 cores is the highest practical number of cores or spatial channels you can have in standard cladding diameter fiber and still maintain good quality transmission,” says Georg Rademacher, who previously headed the project for NICT but who has recently returned to Germany to take up a directorship in optical communications at the University of Stuttgart.

Most fiber cables for long-distance transmission in use today are single core, single-mode glass fibers (SMF). But SMF is approaching its practical limit as network traffic rapidly increases because of AI, cloud computing, and IoT applications. Many researchers are therefore taking an interest in multicore fiber in conjunction with space-division multiplexing (SDM), a transmission technique for using multiple spatial channels in a cable.

Recent advances in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and management have resulted in a growing number of cancer survivors. Researchers constantly strive to understand new ways to support cancer survivors and help them lead a healthy and happy life post-treatment. This has led to our understanding that cancer survivors have different healthcare needs than their counterparts with no history of cancer.

One concern facing cancer survivors involves cardiovascular disease (CVD), a general term including conditions that inflict the heart or blood vessels. Many cancer survivors face a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD) than from cancer itself.

Despite the well-known adverse effects of tobacco use associated with both cancer and CVD, about 20% of cancer survivors continue smoking after diagnosis. How smoking cessation impacts CVD risk after cancer diagnosis remains poorly understood. To address this, a team of researchers recently published their study investigating the cardiovascular consequences of quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis in the European Heart Journal.

Some of the world’s leading human and robot minds are heading to the United Nations.

At a UN summit in Geneva next week, tech luminaries ranging from futurist Ray Kurzweil to DeepMind COO Lila Ibrahim will discuss AI for good. It’s a stellar lineup of speakers, but the real stars in our eyes are the robots.

Over 50 of the beasts — the majority from Europe — will be in attendance. All of them merit places in your dreams and nightmares, but we’ve narrowed the roster down to a list of our 10 favourites.

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the protoplanetary disk around a young star have discovered the most compelling chemical evidence to date of the formation of protoplanets. The discovery will provide astronomers with an alternate method for detecting and characterizing protoplanets when direct observations or imaging are not possible. The results will be published in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

HD 169,142 is a young star located in the constellation Sagittarius that is of significant interest to astronomers due to the presence of its large, dust-and gas-rich circumstellar disk that is viewed nearly face-on. Several protoplanet candidates have been identified over the last decade, and earlier this year, scientists at the University of Liège and Monash University confirmed that one such candidate—HD 169,142 b—is, in fact, a giant Jupiter-like protoplanet.

The discoveries revealed in a new analysis of archival data from ALMA—an international collaboration in which the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a member—may now make it easier for scientists to detect, confirm, and ultimately characterize, protoplanets forming around young stars.

Twenty-five years ago, a neuroscientist and a philosopher bet a case of fine wine on whether scientists would have cracked the neural basis of consciousness by 2023. Now, one of them conceded the prize.

By Alexis Wnuk